It's the end of the world (as we know it)

So, we're again in Interesting Times. And maybe we have had enough for a while.

Nevertheless, this has created an opportunity at least. Yeah, it's a horrible thing what's happening and it would be better if it didn't, but it's giving us lessons, really important ones. And I'd like to mention some of them, as I think about them.

1-In lots of workplaces, it is possible to work from home. This one is written from a privileged standpoint, of course, shops and industries and the primary sector is not included in this. But there's currently a lot of new jobs, based on services, where we have been forced to go there every day and stay there for a lot of hours, to be present just out of a certain old fashioned panic that if we don't have someone breathing on our neck, we won't work. Well, not the case, clearly. At the same time, there's meetings and such things that in the end were not as necessary as we thought and can be shortened or eliminated without that much problem. For sure in-person contact has its advantages too, but this should really made us rethink how we work, and try a more balanced system where maybe we can easily be home at least half of our time.

2-Really essential services are the primary sector, the food shops and the cleaners. Jobs like working in a supermarket or cleaning offices and houses should be better valued and paid nicely. Also better considered.

3-Healtchare must be public. Private healthcare that depends on profit has no advantage in dealing with this, because it requires a lot of resources and hours and it's overall too expensive. Also, public healthcare must be well-funded and have enough resources. And given this learning, I would go further: Just straight up ban and nationalize private healthcare companies. Also, if you're all for private healthcare and vote for parties that are against public one, it's only fair you refute any treatment nor help in public hospitals and facilities. Or reconsider your vote next time.

4-Capitalsim doesn't work. The system is totally broken and this crisis is showing its worst sides. Under pure capitalism, we would need to continue working right now, as we die left and right. Under pure capitalism, now people should just go hungry and starve and die out as they cannot work. Under pure capitalism, any business that was unable to function for this period should just close and disappear, or leave its employees to die out at least. This is neither a sustainable model nor a model we should want to keep. This needs to go. I'm not advocating for communism, but we must get rid of the idea that the market is great, when the truth is the market would see humankind destroyed in order to keep benefits. We have seen this before, in the people that lose track of the real world and require workers to do extra hours to finish a project that will ultimately have no meaning 2 weeks after completion. Well, I'm exaggerating a bit on this example, but this same attitude is the one where some manager considers that maybe people should just work, because the company needs it, without realizing this means people will die.

5-Related to this, we need to make people in power responsible for their actions. Managers who have disregarded warnings and asked people to work have killed people. Governments who haven't taken action once it was clear how serious the situation was and have not followed medical expert's recommendations are guilty of personally killing people. One thing is not knowing what to do, another very different is thinking that since your friend the banker prefers people to die than to close some of his business, you can allow it. Or allowing it out of some political agenda. This means you are killing people. And this is not the only situation when this happens: when a government allows banks to kick people out of their homes from unpaid mortgages, both the bank and the government are directly killing people. When a manager over stresses their workforce to the point of people having nervous breakdowns, they are directly killing people. When a rich bastard not only doesn't pay their taxes but also pressures the government to close public hospitals, they're directly killing people. No more fucking euphemism, if you do these things you're a killer, and you should not be allowed to get away with it.

6-Centralism doesn't work. Look, I think Spain is a failed project and I'd rather be left out of it. Maybe you don't think the same, that's fine. But what is undeniable, as we've seen in companies, countries and other organizations, is that when you centralize everything, when you try to manage personally more and more and more things, when you're further away from the real action separated by layers of responsible people, well, you have a less clear image of what is happening. In this crisis, hospitals and small towns or neighborhoods can know better what's the best actions to take. They can know better what resources they have, what do they lack, what to do. So you leave them be, unless they prove to be doing a bad job out of it. Then, if they lack things, if you have organizations over them you can manage that from such a higher level, and so on. But when you try to, basically, micromanage everywhere, that doesn't work. So let's not do that. From a government point of view, I believe regions should be more independent and able to take their own decisions, since they tend to know better their own needs. For example, now Spain has declared we can go back to work. This is idiotic and will cause deaths as the experts are saying (see point 5), but I'd say that for some regions it may be OK. However, should be managed region by region as I said, to see which ones can do it and which ones cannot.

7-Spain's traditional parties plus the right wing parties are useless. Right wing, we know, they're here to steal and lick their rich friend's anuses, and people can die as far as they care, we all know that. However, I hope it also helps to show that PSOE is almost as bad: they militarized the crisis instead of giving funds to healthcare, and since their members are professional politicians that don't know how to do things but know how to get paid from public funds, we've had the situation were resources are not reaching the people, or they buy the wrong things and millions are wasted, plus time is lost.

8-Left-wing parties do not deserve special protection just because they're considered left-wing. We made this mistake before with PSOE, letting it do things that were not left-wing just because we labelled it as the left-wing party. So, the same applies now to Podemos. They're part of the government even if they're not big enough to make some changes. I understand they're not able to criticize some of the government actions without creating a conflict, but that doesn't make them untouchable. We should criticize the fact that they let military to lead this crisis. We should criticize that they're not protecting workers by allowing people to work. And we should criticize their silence or their praise to the current government, when it's not right.

9-USA, UK and Brazil, as very capitalist and right-wing countries, are far from the worst of it, and it will be a massacre in there. Spain is already one because of several of the mentioned points, and forcing people back to work now will kill and numbers will grow again.

10-Catalunya's proposals have been a bit more smart than Spain's (because duh, it's not very hard to be), but far from effective, and one of the involved parties has also been de-funding public healthcare, and that's something we should not forget either.

There's plenty more things I could say, but politically speaking I find these are quite relevant...

Gangneung: Reminiscenses Of Lund

It's been a bit more than a month since I moved to Korea.

I did visit it before, so I already got some ideas about the place, but living here has showed me a bit more of the life here.

And it heavily reminds me of Sweden....or to be fair and more precise, of my particular experiences while in Lund, Sweden.

First of all, most apartments have wooden floors and floor-based heating. This is a small but important detail. Because of this, most apartments also have an entry area where you leave your shoes and jackets. This is rather common in winter areas, but this in Korea is very very similar to the same thing in Sweden, with different tiles and height, to really delimitate that you should not step on the wooden floors with the street shoes. The apartments's style is also familiar, with thick walls and windows, quality details and big living room/kitchen areas, and then one room or more apart, a distribution based on big spaces more than in compartmentalising the floor.

Then of course there's the weather, which is not as cold as north Sweden by far, but it is similar to the weather in the part of Sweden where I lived (although Gangneung is colder than Lund), more temperate but still pretty cold, where it snows during winter. By the way, it snowed already a couple of times, and it was cold enough that it accumulated and lasted for 2-3 days each time, plus in the mornings there were ice layers everywhere. This of course poses problems, especially because I move around with a bike, and I need to be careful about this ice....

Moving around with the bike is also a nice reminder. It's not like I don't move around with a bike in Barcelona, but here in Gangneung the town is small enough to allow using it almost everywhere, while streets and roads are, if not prepared, at least open to the fact that people use bikes around. Adler was also small enough to use a bike, but the reality was that the culture there was unused to this so nobody did it...It is true that Gangneung has way too many cars, and cars are the transport of choice of most people, there's not a lot of bikes going around....but there's some. And again, this is from my point of view, and both here and in Sweden I had similar experiences while using a bike (like going towards some party in a bike, going shopping in a bike, crossing snow with a bike, using a bike while slightly drunk, etc.), in part I guess because it's the two places I've been where it's easy to have your own bike, and it's not stressful.

This brings me to the security thing...I can leave the bike unlocked in the street or just with a locked wheel and I know no one is going to steal it. I love this feeling of security, not even Barcelona has this....here I know I can have my bike to move around and I will probably be fine, and it's not a source of worry. The same applies for using mobiles on the street or having money in the wallet. After Rio, this is incredible and allows me to be a lot more relaxed and calm at any moment.

Internet is also pretty similar, with rather good speeds, although I believe the intercontinental connections and the state censorship that is applied on websites slows traffic down considerably depending on what you're trying to access....

Finally, there's also the social atmosphere. One thing in Korea that is pretty awesome is that all English teachers need to be natives, so from an English-speaking country. This, plus the Olympic travellers, means there's a big group of people from all around the world, even in such a small town. So it feels you're meeting people from lots of places, and because of that there's also a "party" atmosphere, in a way.....I really like this atmosphere, and in other projects there was also a certain feeling like this, but it was usually Olympic-related while here it's more open (well, in the sense that there's also this other group, the English teachers). There's even people who will be happy to meet to play board and card games...

Of course, there's also things that are not similar at all (starting from the population, not many tall and big, blonde, blue-eyed people in the streets here...)

For example, the culture here seems a lot more closed to foreigners and changes, and there are social issues that are light-years behind in Korea compared to Spain (and let's not compare it with Sweden which is more advanced that Spain in plenty of those...). There's a big cult for looks in here, and women are still treated really bad in general...also, work follows a very capitalist model, where you cannot get sick and stay at home to rest (which is worse for the company as well because you're less productive at work and you can get other people sick). SIM cards and phone numbers are ridiculous hard to get. The food is evidently completely different, usually spicy even when they say it's not, or very sweet. There's plenty of dishes with lots of green vegetables, mushrooms and leaves(and rice, of course), and meat is common in dishes but not in big quantities outside barbecue places (and in supermarkets it's expensive). And as I already mentioned, traffic is very car-based, even for small trips that with a bike would be 10 minutes or less, and driving is rather aggressive and chaotic (but well, I was in Russia and Brazil, nothing new or worse than that, really) , with plenty of intersections that are rather badly-designed and cause waits for everyone involved. One surprise I got was that, in general, cars do not respect pedestrians, but they do watch out for them, it's just they don't give way to pedestrians unless they're about to hit them or so...

So yeah, plenty of differences actually, and more I have not mentioned...


Still, the atmosphere has a certain similarity for sure... 

Daily Deadlock

Some time ago it rained a bit. When leaving work I had the option to take a taxi, and I did. I will not make the same mistake another time in a rainy day...

To explain, this is Rio:

In this area there are around 15 million people. And every day, we all need to go to work.

Now, we have two main areas, the rich zones in the south(inside the red areas) and the poor zones in the north:

The poor zones tend to start working earlier,  and they basically go to work to provide services in the rich zones:

The rich zones work concentrates in the centre,  where there is a lot of offices. The centre is considered to be only this:

Now, the thing about Rio is that, do you see these green marked areas? Those are mountains.

And I mean mountains. The green right area's highest point is 700m. In the coast there are 350m and 500m mountains. Basically they sprout from the ground and get high fast, giving Rio this peculiar look:

So, if you check the map again, you'll notice that most central and rich areas are actually surrounded by mountains. As in completely surrounded. No chance in hell to make a superhighway connecting them.

So, we get tunnels or "valleys" of two lanes in each direction. Mostly in these points:

Of course, we cannot forget people coming from other cities to work, which have these entry points too:

Now, check what's the subway line available to help move all these people around these very closed areas with very specific and sparse entry points:

(this is an approximation of the subway, but you get the idea)

So basically most people need to take cars or buses. Of course the rich areas use cars, but the poor areas also have plenty of those.

This results in a daily clusterfuck of epic proportions. People in the south zone may take up to two hours to reach the centre, and 2 more to get back. If you do this in the middle of the night the route takes 20 minutes.

When it rains especially, seeing as how people clearly dissolve under the rain, people that maybe would walk a bit and take buses or metro in a clear day takes car or taxi.

The average time to go from the south rich area in the centre and the actual business centre is 2 hours during rush hour. Outside rush hour it's actually 20 minutes. And when it rains, you just better forget to take the car becasue then moving just from the business centre towards Zona Sul, where Copacabana is, can take already more than one hour....

Power and Choice

Nowadays at work I have managed to get into a position a little higher than before. This is normal once you acquire experience. Once you have experience, there's plenty that does not surprise you, and you have more solutions to things, so people ask you more and more and depend more on you than before.

This gives you a certain power. They say power corrupts, and well, there's some truth...it is not that it corrupts so much as that it is fun to use power. For example, knowing a second language is a great power. It allows you to expand your communications and meet new people. So it is fun to have this power. Once you have it, you want to use it.

In the IT world, depending on the complexity of the company, one of the great ways of having power is when you can influence what is being done at several levels. In the end, most IT is based on a guy somewhere doing code, and this guy usually has the ultimate power of screwing the whole thing or making it work fine. Companies should remember to treat this guy VERY well, but they don't always do.

However, apart from this guy, there's usually a big list of other people deciding on what the guy will need to do and how the code will be used. Currently I'm one of these people, and hell, it feels nice....

It feels nice to get the extra attention, to be consulted and considered. Very often in big companies your voice gets lost in the middle of the mess that they are, so it is nice to reach a position where you can be heard, even if just a little.

It is amazing to finally be able to influence monolithic things, and see them change slightly. It feels nice. And I understand that it is easy to get addicted and want more. Not only to influence, but to direct and manage.

However, of course, not all is just fun. As the movie said, power comes with responsibility. You need to use it wisely. And part of having power in a company means that you have power over other people, and choices to make. Power to have to ask someone to come on Saturday. Power to tell off someone if they did a bad job, Power to keep everyone working one extra hour because it is needed. And this part sucks, of course...

We all create a narrative in our lives. We imagine ourselves in our story, and we tell ourselves stories about it. We play parts, we follow patterns that we detect in real life.

Recently, I had a person on my team fired. Not really fired fired, but he did not pass the selection period. He did not do anything wrong. He was not someone who got upset, or complained too much, or someone lazy. He was just...not smart enough.

It would have been easier if he had been a bad person. We had one of those too, in another team, and firing him was not a problem. But this guy in my team was just not good for this job, nothing else. So in any stories, this is the part for the bastard,the bad guy, the boss that fires the innocent worker.

Life is never that simple, but still, it's a shame I had to fire him.

With power should come also a higher awareness of consequences, Anything that I needed this guy to do I would have ended up doing myself, which means I would have had double the work. I was not willing to go through that, so I made my choice.

After all, obtaining power is giving you the possibility for more choices, and some of them are the hard ones....

Life Is Strange

A few weeks ago, while checking a list of recommended games on Steam I came across Life Is Strange.

I watched the trailer, and it seemed to me like a very interesting premise. I researched a little more, and I though the idea was really awesome, so I decided to buy it, and I would recommend anyone to do so too.

In the game, you are a young 18-years old girl studying in some academy in a small town. Because of a confrontation, you discover you can go back in time for a couple of minutes, giving you the ability to change actions and conversation, and to obtain clues and knowledge to use after rewinding time.

This is the basic premise, and then you need to explore this world with the small town and the academy, investigating certain dark occurrences and a disappearance.

From the start, the game gave me a very strong "Twin Peaks" atmosphere. The setting is quite similar, a small town with power plays, secrets and some supernatural occurrences. You can even find a "Fire walk with me" graffiti at some moment, so this similarity is done on purpose. The atmosphere becomes quite mysterious and interesting thanks to that.

At the same time, the calm indie soundtrack makes you feel relaxed and sad, slowing down the pace and making you sometimes to just sit and observe the scenery. You want to read and observer every little detail of each of the places you can visit, to make sure you don't miss a thing. The process is incredibly immersive, and you get easily lost in this world.

The time-travel skill is really useful, and there are several nice puzzles where you need to play with the ability to extract information, or fix an action that caused unexpected effects (like breaking something by accident). Lots of actions show a small butterfly afterwards, indicating to you that the action will have consequences. Most of the time those key actions are based on conversations, about what you decide to tell or do with someone. And there's way too many to easily control them, so plenty of times you set for a certain course and hope for the best.

Of course here a big point is that you know you're in a game, so sometimes some action may seem weird if you would be in real life. Since you're in the narrative of the game, where you are extra aware of being in a story that follows certain tropes, you need to guess if sometimes the game is playing a trope straight with you or is trying to subvert it (or if it is trying to make you think they subverted it when they played it straight actually), so it is quite a fun mental exercise of deciding which action will have the best outcome in such a story, the usual "I know you know I know you know", and trying to guess in which step we need to stop. Hopefully you can always rewind and see the direct outcomes, but the ripples these create are hard to predict.

The game comes in episodes, and last episode (episode 5) has not come out yet and is expected in October. I finished the first 2 episodes and I'm in the middle of the third, delaying it a little bit so I don't need to wait for the 5th one.I don't want to get caught in a cliffhanger or very tense situation, waiting to see the final outcome of everything....

The story turns very serious quite fast and punches you in the gut repeatedly, reminding you that it was your choices the ones that created this situation. It is clearly dramatic, and we still don't know how it will end, but even with time-travelling, the situation you put yourself in is quite complicated and hard to solve....

I will say that it is true that every single thing you do may affect greatly the outcome of the game, and that some plot points that I have seen would not have been possible using other choices. The game itself does not have hard puzzles, but the overall puzzle of making the best choice selection is not an easy one, and it makes you obsess about past actions while considering things very carefully.

I believe it is a very innovative game (even if other games have done the time-travel thing already), also in the aspect of characters used and the story it tells. Not many games really commit to the idea that your choice matters, triggering completely different outcomes based on that and in this way creating not a single story, but the possibility for thousands.

This game was recommended by Feminist Frequency because of its use of female characters, and I was appalled to know some publishers wanted to convert the main character into a boy. The story works perfectly as it is because it is a girl, and I cannot understand how some people, in this day an age, still believe such a game cannot work. However, I want to dedicate another post about these topics, soon...

For the moment, I'll just finish saying that this is an amazing game that will suck you into its world, and you need to give it a try, it is totally worth it.

Summer in Rio and Buzios

We're reaching the end of Summer in the south hemisphere, and I wanted to comment a few things.

First of all, Rio gets really really hot.

I commented before that in "Winter" we could already reach 30 degrees in the sun. However, that was Winter still.

In Summer, in the sun, it's closer to about 40-45.

However, since humans adapt to everything, we're already rather fine with the situation. When temperature goes back to 32 or around in the street, we can already tell that it's "fresh", or "not so bad today". And at night we consider them "cold" if it is less than 26.

Anyway, it does feels hot. And here the pool comes into action.

Let me tell you: It is fucking awesome.

Elay and my wife enjoy it almost every hot day, and I only go there during the weekends, but when the heat is almost unbearable, when the simplest task makes you sweat, being able to just submerge yourself and cool your body is great. Especially because I go to the pool from my apartment in my swimsuit, without needing to change, and in 2 minutes I can be back taking a shower. We pay more condominio than other people because of the pool, but it's totally worth it.

As a side effect, Elay has learned how to hold his breath underwater and how to swim with floaters (even if he doesn't speak any language that we understand). And we are developing a brownish skin tone as well, which maybe its not the healthiest thing, but it seems better than the nuclear "pc-screen-at-night glow" white that we usually have.

While all this was happening, we reached February, and the city went crazy. We were told, and it feels like this, that the new year only starts after Carnival, and it is a quite accurate description.

Offices closed earlier, and all buildings put extra protection against their glass to avoid accidents. Streets were cut, and crime rised worrisomely.

We missed the worst of it because we went to Buzios for 3 nights.

Buzios is a resort town in the lake  area east of Rio. It is not far in distance, but with the current infrastructure of roads it takes still 3 hours at least, if you do not find traffic jams. We found traffic jams and it took us quite longer to get there.

The place is a tourist area, full of little houses and hotels but with lots of greenery and space between them, and with plenty of Atlantic beaches. It reminded us of plenty of other resort areas we had visited. It had touches of Eivissa (not many people,a few small streets, you can always see a house or hotel around...), Adler (small streets with dirt, tacky souvenir shops, shady tours all around, physics-defying 5D cinemas...) or other typical resort/beach towns.

Our hotel was in a hill, 10 minutes away from a very big and calm beach. We were not very happy with it. It could have been great, but it was advertised as a 4 star hotel with several services, and it was not 4 stars and it didn't have those services. Going with lower expectations, we would have had no problems with it, but you cannot promise what you don't have and expect people to be happy.

It did have great views, an awesome pool and quite a calm atmosphere, that is true. We ended up going to the hotel pool most of the days (it had great views too), and walking for a bit in the centre at night, to have dinner.

We also went to the beach once, to mark it as "done", but we realised we don't enjoy beach that much. Especially a beach with no services like showers or toilets...but also the beach atmosphere was not that good. Tacky is the word to use again, a little bit like in Adler. The sand was awesome, though, very fine grains that felt quite good to step on (although we ended up with sand everywhere, another thing we don't enjoy). The water felt cold after being used to our building pool of 26-30 degrees, thanks to the sun, but we discovered Elay doesn't mind at all (to the point of craziness, because he was clearly cold but still running towards deeper water and getting mad when we had to grab him back and dry him).

Anyway, it was actually quite relaxing, in a "doing nothing" kind of way, having a beer from time to time, swimming and just relaxing far away from the city. The natural aspects of the area are awesome, with lots of exuberant vegetation, clean beaches and little hills and mountains for you to explore.

I don't know if we will return to this area (because with Elay there are not that many things to do for his age there, later on he could actually enjoy it), but we had 3 good nights there, and we managed to avoid the chaos that ensued in Rio during the carnival.

All in all, we're happy with the experience

Natural Things

Elay has been walking around for sometime now, which means he touches everything.

This is an evident problem because some things are fragile. or organized, or dangerous, and we cannot let him touch and grab them (and he gets mad when we don't let him do so, but oh well...).  This means following him around and supervising what he does if he wants to walk around the place.

A few weeks ago I tried to show him xbox games, to see what he would do, and let him touch the controller so he would see things moving in the screen whe he pressed buttons. He was not that interested actually, and I don't know if he did fully grasp he could make things happen through the controller. He was happier biting the controller, and then going to the big TV and slapping the screen (which then we had to go and tell him no, he could only touch it softly...even if he tried more times and we had to kept telling no).

This made me think about tablets, phones and other new devices. In lots of modern technology, they defend natural ways of doing things. And our son clearly showed that it is natural that, if you see something in a screen, you interact with it touching the screen. Consoles have also used this concept with movement recognition (Kinect, Wii), in which you use all you body to do something. It's really a natural way of interacting with equipment.

Do you know what else is natural? Dying of appendicitis. Another example? Cyanide can be found in nature. "Natural" things are not necessary "good", or "better" than artificial things.  Some natural things can be improved in a huge number of ways.

Interacting with technology has been evolving through the years, and lately everything has a touchscreen, some have voice-recognition, and some even have movement recognition. Some of these are based on science-fiction work (like the famous mobile air screens in Minority Report). And they look cool, and we definitely should think if it is possible to make and create ways to make it, becasue in some applications it may be useful (like 3D modelling in the middle of the air).

However, practicality should always be in mind. Touchscreens are good for mobiles, because they open space for the screen while allowing mobiles not to have a keyboard. They are good for saving space, which is an important trait in a mobile device. Tablets have a similar principle, if you want to easily move around with them and see videos and play point-and-click games, they're good. Nevertheless, touchscreens are not precise. If you need to select text, or press a small button, touchscreens suck. Because our fingers are thick and imprecise, and the only way they can be useful to select is if the thing being selected has, at least, twice the surface than your finger, not leaving margin for error.

Touchscreen in cameras? Terrible idea. Touchscreen in PCs? Even worse. Touchscreens in gaming? Really really stupid, outside point-and-click games with big thingies to click. The aberration that represents a Windows Server Operating System with touchscreen interface (when servers don't even have touchscreens)? Let's not even waste words...

Same applies to kinect and other movement sensors. To do physical activities it is a good idea, and for some party games as well. However, any shooter where you need to move yourself in front of a camera is a really bad one where you cannot reach immersion at all.

Ideally, communicating with technology is just a translation between what our brain wants to do and what the technology needs to do. the perfect communication would be to have thought-activated things that really do what you want them to do. This is actually hard and complex, so instead we use interfaces like a mouse, or a controller. The idea is to translate our thought into a minimum of actions (like moving muscles). A touchscreen can be a good interface, but the mouse is a lot more precise and with less movements. If you want to select text, the mouse is almost perfect, because it offers a huge amount of precision and control in a flat area and using a very limited number of muscles. For example, if you want to apply the the idea "select text", you need to slightly move your hand until the cursor is on top of the text, and then press slightly with one of your fingers on the mouse button, while again moving slightly your hand and maybe your arm. The more muscles you need to use to translate ideas to the machine, the worse the interface is because the brain needs to do more work and use more parts to transmit simple ideas. Therefore, mouses to use in the air, while you move your hands, are idiotic unless you want to manipulate 3D objects. Since computer screens are usually flat, moving your hands in 3D is stupid. you will end up moving them in a 2D plane in front of the screen, and for that we already have the mouse and without needing to raise arms. To select text with a 3D mouse or system where you wave your hands in the air, you need to move all your arm until the hand is in a position that the computer recognizes as being on top of the text, then signal with the hand by moving one or more of your fingers quite a lot, and then waving your arm around. If the way to select is a touchscreen, the process is quite similar. This is quite less efficient than using the mouse on top of the table.

The same applies with games. The Xbox  controller layout is almost perfect in allowing you to do plenty of actions,including moving two joysticks while pressing buttons. Changing that for a touchscreen or for a movement detector is replacing small finger movements with full body and arm movements, and removing the chance of activating different buttons or actions at the same time.

Again, I'm not saying in all situations it is stupid to use these "new" interaction technologies. I'm just saying that, for example, if you make a dancing game, by all means use a movement sensor. If you're making an RPG with a first person view, don't bother and give me a controller with 10 buttons that I don't need to look at to know what I'm pressing.  Just because you have a movement sensor, don't force it on everything you do.

This is especially annoying regarding bad quality touchscreens for devices that have screens too small for fingers. For example cameras and video cameras. Lately some of them have touchscreens to interact with them, when a small joystick or 4 arrow buttons would be extremely more efficient and easy to use. 

And then there is this trend to force touchscreens on normal PCs or even on servers (again, why the hell did you do this, Microsoft??), which needs its own category of stupidity, because normal stupid look like genius by comparison...

Economics, Apartments And MMORPGs

As I mentioned in previous posts, we're currently searching for an apartment to buy. If we don't find anything before we go to Rio it's fine, but we're investigating to see what's in the market, and if there's an affordable apartment that we like, we will not wait 2 years to get it. Right now we've found one that we may like, and we've even made an offer, but things are still pretty much in the air.

As I said, the whole selection process deserves another post, but right now I'd like to talk about apartment prices, their negotiations, and economics in general. And also how the experience of playing in a Massive Multiplayer Online game helps a lot as an Economics case study, for apartments and for the world in general.

Apartment prices in Spain are still stupidly high compared to people's salaries, but right now they're reaching a level where you can consider to buy one without sacrificing your first-born to the bank. Second hand apartments are still the only option because, with a few exceptions, new apartments are owned by banks. Bank managers (as in bank owners and directors, not office workers nor office directors) know that the prices have gone down and nobody is even able to consider paying such prices for new apartments, but if they lower the prices of new apartments they need to write down that they lost money. Of course, they'd prefer to rape their mothers before admitting that they screw up big time and that they have thousands of useless empty houses that give no benefit, so instead they don't lower the prices and maintain a price bubble.

They hope that the prices will go up again and they will get a benefit. This may happen, but it may take 50-100 years (which is how many years may be needed to get back to a situation in Spain where most people not only can easily buy houses, but can also eat afterwards). Meanwhile, our friendly Spanish government gives them our money (recovered from us through taxes) so they can continue operating without having to get money from selling that big amount of useless cheap houses.

So, we're left with the second-hand house market.

In there, things are currently interesting. Prices were not able to resist the evident difference between supply and demand, and they have plummeted quite a lot. Just 7 years ago it was normal to pay 500.000 euros for a small hole in a wall, and now it is reasonable to get decent places for 200.000 or less (depends on size of apartment, situation, age, state, etc.).

Now we're in the process of negotiating the price for an apartment we consider as an option.

Negotiating prices, reading the market tendencies and the economy in general reminds me a lot about the time I was playing Lineage 2. Lineage 2 is a Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (or MMORPG for short, pronounced like yhatzee does). You have a permanent world where you log in and your character appears. Levelling up and progressing through Lineage 2 is an extremely hard task (or it was when I was playing) that it's not easy achievable. (all the following comments are based on my experiences of the game when I was playing it, before 2008).

The problem I faced when I was playing Lineage 2, is that to level up you need to invest a lot of money in resources and equipment. And the process of levelling up does not reward you with equivalent money. Basically, to level up you need to lose big amounts of in-game money. To be fair, there are ways to get money levelling up and hunting monsters, but they require you to play for 8 hours straight, together with more people, and to limit usage of resources to a minimum. Even like this, profits are minimal. In this world it is true that permanent growth is possible, since when you kill a monster more money gets added to the world. Anyway, this creates funny economic dynamics.

To put it in perspective...once you reach level 20, the equipment that you will need to start using at that moment to be able to fight people and monsters of your level costs close to 2 millions in the internal currency. Once you get to level 20, if killing monsters has reported you around 100.000 of the internal currency count yourself as lucky.

As you can see, there is a bit of a gap between standard income and necessary money to survive. This only gets worse in later levels, since after level 40 the equipment you need is not even sold in game shops, you need to craft it from pieces that monsters drop. Getting all required pieces takes usually more time than levelling up to the point where the equipment you were trying to create is now useless to you.

As a result of all of this, the basis of living in that world is player commerce. Players have the option to trade things and even open shops that offer things and services (like crafting services). Capitalism is king, and prices evolve with the time depending on demand and on what is affordable by most players. What's more, thanks to the constant influx of money to the economy from the players, the world is in a permanent state of inflation, with very strange and particular cases of devaluation. The ones that got rich keep getting richer, and new players will have it very hard to reach a stable economic situation where you don't need to save every single coin.

This really teaches you the workings of the real world, if you want to survive inside the game. For example inside the game I managed to establish a small business of selling helmets. These helmets were needed to complete a set that gave some extra stats for players between level 40 and 52.

However, I did not own any helmets. I did not have the pieces and materials that allowed you to build such helmets. I did definitely not have the ability to even finish building these helmets.

What I was doing was buying materials in a city, for a price that I knew was rather cheap. I bought them in bulk, and when I had my calculated quotas of materials then I proceeded to contract players who had shops to create composite materials. Finally, I contracted someone who was able to made the actual helmet from the composite materials and pieces.

Once I had the helmet (or helmets), I proceeded to go to another city where this helmet had the biggest price (because prices changed from city to city, given the fact that reaching each city required different levels and hours of play). In there I opened a shop and sold the helmet.

Recollecting and buying all the composite materials and pieces, and then contracting other players to build composites and the final helmet was a long process, and it costed around 1.2 millions in the game currency.

However, the completed helmets were sold for prices between 2 and 3.5 millions (depending on the moment). In the worst case, I got 166% of the invested money back. In the best case, 290%. And I did absolutely nothing. I was just an intermediate that knew prices of materials and prices of the finished item, and knew which margins were acceptable. Sure, I wasted a lot of in-game time on this, but it was usually time I was studying at university, and meanwhile my computer was on with the automatic shop activated so other players could sell me materials or buy my helmets.

Sometimes I got people competing, trying to sell helmets next to me for 1.5 million and similar things.I just bought all their helmets with my investment money and sold them for 2.5, getting me an easy, fast and clean benefit of 1 million per helmet.

So, this game showed quite easily a number of points that you always need to consider in doing businesses and buying things, especially when their prices do not match the price of materials used or hours invested in them:

1-Living is expensive, and working hard does not guarantee that you will have money or that you'll be able to afford necessary things.

2-In order to win lots of money, you need to start with lots of money.

3-Without laws regulating business, established companies can ruin any competitors by just buying their stock to resell it at inflated prices or by selling at a loss until the competitors run out of business.

4-Try to avoid as many distributors, agents and other intermediaries between the maker of the product and you. Each step makes the final product stupidly more expensive than the real cost of making it.

5-Monopolies will abuse their position of power and inflate prices.

6-Even with inflated prices and monopolies, customers will call bullshit when the price is too much, and they will opt to live without your product if necessary.

There are more lessons that you can take from the game, but there's no need to list all of them. It's just to show that these games are great examples of pure capitalism (and how incredibly crappy it is for everyone that doesn't have a great idea or control over some particular market). It also shows the catastrophes that can happen in such unregulated markets. (there's a lot of other MMO games that can show you examples of this).

Regarding apartments, what the game taught me is that the price of such things is as much as people are willing to pay. Building an apartment does not cost their actual prices. The apartment prices depend on the idea of a fair price that most people will have in their minds, and prices will change only when people think they should change.

At the moment, every week or two I get notifications that some apartment I was interested dropped 10.000 euros, or even 20.000.

I believe that no matter what newspapers and government are trying to advertise, people still can't pay for apartments, and what's more, people still believe they should not pay for such prices and that prices will go down. There's a big advertising campaign to change people's minds, but I don't believe it's working yet.

I want an apartment where we can live, and I don't care if the prices will drop more, or will increase later. I just want our own place. However, it is an interesting moment to buy, and it is funny to see all the people trying to convince you prices might rise a lot any time next week...

Maybe I'm wrong and prices will really increase soon....but somehow I doubt it.

Back in Barcelona

Having a child and temporarily moving back to your parent's home is quite time-consuming. We've been here for a little more than a month now, but it feels like ages ago, and we've been very busy.

In this time, we've been visiting friends and family. Everyone wants to see Elay, and Elay has a particular timetable that difficuls visiting. (Apart from that, he's very very funny and we're enjoying a lot being with him and seeing him learn^^)

Anyway, we're more adapted to life here now, even if its only temporary: we've managed to be assigned to Rio too, so around July we will move again, for a big period this time.

Meanwhile, we're taking live here as a small vacation, even if we work and do similar things. At work the level of things to do is not comparable to the integration team, and at home we have our parents to help with Elay and to do some daily things.

Living in Barcelona is really really nice. It sounds patriotic, or like those people that say that your original home is where you live best. I don't agree with that, I just think Barcelona is my favourite place to live so far: Adler was too wild, too poor, too corrupted and too much old-fashioned with ideas. London was too big, too gloomy and cold, had too many people and its people thought too much "inside the box".  Vilnius is too poor at the moment, too big for its public transport network and way too cold 9 months of the year. Lund and Malmo are my second favourite places, but the weather is still not as good, and their people are colder too.

Barcelona is a big city but not that big(like Vilnius and Malmo), it has people but not too many (like Adler, Malmo, Lund and Vilnius), the weather is very nice(like Adler), its economy is not very poor (like London, Malmo and Lund), the transport network is really good(like Malmo, Lund and maybe London), it has lots of things to do(like London and Malmo), it allows you to buy things on shops or through internet(like London, Malmo, Lund or Vilnius), it's in the coast(like Malmo and Adler) but also next to the mountains(like Vilnius), it's well communicated by plane and train(like London and Malmo), you can use the bike to move around(like Malmo and Lund, and maybe London), and the city has lots of beautiful areas and places(like London, Malmo and Vilnius).

So, based on a number of things that we subjectively think are best, we can objectively mark Barcelona as our favourite place so far. Scandinavian countries are a close second, and if economy and politics doesn't improve, this will add to the city's drawbacks, but right now it's our favourite place.

One of my favourite things that I've rediscovered is bicing, the public bikes that you can use for free for 30 minutes.

We' be been checking apartments to buy recently (something that may require another post). Everything is very close in this city, and if I go alone it's very easy to grab a bike and go. And the feeling of freedom that you have going around with the bike is one of the best in the world, specially in sunny but fresh weather while you move through big streets lined with trees and grass...

I really have missed using the bike^^

Russia And The Occidental Media

Olympics went very well, and now we're taking care of Paralympics. We've had some issues but during work hours we had not much to do, apart from checking that everything worked (by watching TV and comparing what we see with what we have in our systems).

Summing it up, we've been watching Olympics all the time at the office, and that's what we're supposed to do. 

While Olympics happened, and with the current problems in Europe, we've noticed that the media is being quite harsh about several things that are happening around here in Russia. There's a number of things that I didn't want to comment right away, but seeing that most media has already reported it, I see no problem in commenting them. At the same time, there are things that were not true, and that is turning out to be surprisingly annoying as well. Russia and Russian government does bad things, but when they get criticized for things that are not true I feel like defending them too. 

So here's some facts that were said about Sochi and Russia, and our own experiences about if they're true or not, plus other stuff about Russia :

-Installations were not ready. 

I believe this to be true for the hotels. I believe lots of hotels in the area were done by private companies and owners. We have noticed that in this area, all these people are incredibly greedy and selfish. Our landlords are nice, but just before them the first apartment that we checked was owned by the boss of a construction company. His stupidity and greediness level was incredible, and costed him around 500.000 RUB, we calculated, lost by trying to gain an extra 50.000 RUB.  

Apart from that, construction companies in Russia have terrible, terrible planning. Lots of people have renovated or changed things around their houses and apartments during 2013, including restaurants and hotels. We have noticed that most deadlines are not just passed, they're basically abused, dismembered and their corpses are set on fire. One restaurant that we liked to go closed "for a week" in 2013 for improvements. 2-3 months later, it was opened again. Some friends searching for apartments were shown empty shells, and promised that in a week they would be ready for living. 2 months later they could still hear the construction tasks. One shop in a shopping mall was promised to be inaugurated on November 15th. On November 15th,  they change the text so it would say January 15th. One of our own offices was promised to be available on May 2012. People were able to move there on December 2012. The apartment in top of our current home started renovating in April 2013, and until December 2013 we could hear daily lots of drilling (and there's just so may holes you can make before you end up without walls). And it goes on and on...

These delays are caused because the owners and constructions managers do not care, and the workers are barely illiterate, really dumb, brutally exploited and not properly supervised. This works fine for the managers. If you build a perfect road, you will have to work hard on it for one year and then forget about it for the next 10. If you build a defective road, you will have work every time you need to fix it, every 2-3 months. Of course, in a fair competitive market that would mean not getting hired again. However, in Russia (like in Spain) this is not the case, friends of politicians get the contracts, and only in extreme cases of pure incompetence a company will not be asked to do something again.

Finally, constructions in here are really really bad at the fine details. Materials and solutions used are of a very bad quality, and the end result sometimes breaks before it was even used. For example, in our home we have lots of little lamps. Instead of using special light bulbs with low power consumption, these lamps use very hot and small light bulbs. The end result is that these bulbs overheat and break the lamps.

This adds up to a situation where the impression is a really bad one, specially in private-owned residences and hotels.

However, things like the villages for the athletes, the offices for the reporters and the venues themselves were ready for the athletes since long ago. It is true that some venues were not ready for anything else apart from the athletes (as in no food, no toilets, no transportation, no equipment) until 1 or 2 days before the Olympics, but the competitions would have been possible, and in the end things worked out somehow in there as well.

-Sochi is next to a conflictive area.

This one was one of the things the media loved to scare people about: "Sochi is near the Caucasus, a very politically unstable area, with Islamist groups and small republics that are conflictive. There was a terrorist attack in a city nearby. It's also next to the territory Russia stole from Georgia that became independent".

It is true that Sochi is in a region that includes these parts. However, people forget that Russia is mind-blowingly supidly big. As in the biggest country in the world, with no competition whatsoever.

The area that is considered conflictive and that includes a city that received an attack? It's as big as most European countries. It's like fearing for the safety of Tolouse after Madrid received an attack. It's like considering that having Olympics in Seville is not safe because it's close to Euskadi, where terrorist operated until recently. The distances we're talking about are similar to these.

That doesn't mean nothing can happen in here...but things need to be taken with perspective. And the important perspective here is that Russia is huge, and its "regions" are easily comparable with most European countries.

As per the the areas stolen from Georgia, as usual the situation is more complex than that. Abkhazia was a region inside Georgia with its own culture and traditions, and tension between ethnic groups caused that the region rebelled and became independent. In the process, the most radical Abkhazians took control and performed very stupid acts (like expelling anybody who wasn't Abkhazian, or even people who were Abkhazians but had more moderate views). Sure, Russia supported Abkhazia in this conflict, but it's not as if the tension was created by Russia, or as if Georgia did not do stupid things as well, that increased the problems in the region and caused a breaking point and a revolt. And whatever the rest of the countries say, Abkhazia currently is independent, and the people who live there want to keep it this way.

-Sochi has subtropical climate and it's stupid to do winter sports in there.

I've heard this one several times now. When people hear"subtropical", they imagine high temperatures, sun, and such things, and think that's it's a really bad idea to do winter sports in there, and that all the snow was brought from somewhere else.

I don't know the exact details of why this climate is categorized "subtropical", but I can tell one thing: It's slightly colder than in Barcelona, and slightly less humid. With this in mind, it's clear that the place is warm, but not warm in the tropical way, with 27 degrees all year long and no seasons. In winter, we have reached temperatures close to 1 or 2 degrees in the worst days, while keeping between 5 and 10 degrees all the other days. That's in the coast, of course, next to the sea. In the mountains it's much easier to reach temperatures below zero.

The climate is similar to Vancouver I believe, rainy in winter but not very cold.

Therefore, it's not so weird to have winter sports here. Actually, the place have several ski stations, that were open long before the Olympics were set here, and some of them did not even participate in any events and were open for normal use.

In the coast it doesn't snow and in summer it's very warm, but the mountains are close and very high, and therefore we've had snow in there several days.

It is true that the conditions are not optimal. It gets too warm for snow fast, and lots of times there are big areas in the stations that are not usable for skiing. The optimal months are probably just January and February. However, you do get snow in the area, and therefore it's not some crazy idea instigated by Putin, it's similar to most other winter Olympics, where the city was in one place and the mountain area with the snow competitions was some kilometers away.

-Russia has lots of corruption, and this has influenced the Games.

This is sadly true. Russian culture is very similar to Spanish culture in several aspects, and one of them is this (although in Spain not everybody participates in it). Lots of public sector workers participate in this, and it is normal to give extra money to people so they pay you better attention and finish some tasks faster. In here it's very common that police officers stop people to get bribes, which is not helped by a strict and stupid legislation that assures that if you're stopped they will find something to accuse you of not complying with it.

You can see it daily, by the prices of the apartments, by the services in the hospitals, by the state of the roads and the transport. Russia has a big corruption problem coupled with restrictive laws, that makes it very hard to do anything unless you start bribing people. When you actually feel its effects in your daily life, you know it's too big and deep. And it's evident the Games have been organised between some old friends that have split all the money used for them.

-Russia is very sexist and intolerant.

This is also sadly true. It is evident with the latest laws regarding homosexuality and how gays are treated, but it also affects the relationships between men and women, and what is acceptable or not.

In Russia men are still "real men", who have the technical jobs and bring money home, while the women need to stay at home taking care of the house, food and kids. Of course not everybody is like that anymore, but the general culture is still very similar to this idea. Women are nice decorations that later on will manage a household. To attract a powerful man, women will keep their looks as good as they can, and once they are married they will keep the looks to fend off competition. Men consider women weaker, in need of care, and they will recommend women to not bother with difficult tasks (like technical studies).  Advertisements asking for only one sex are common (as in, "a company is searching for a man that has IT experience"). One of the most popular Russian songs form last year basically was saying "you're such a cool man that I want to have your son, and also a daughter".

I was explained by a Russian friend that the saddest part is that this is considered to be some cultural value that needs to be preserved. In order to do that, for example, Russia produces thousands of series and movies that overflow the Russian media to avoid poeple getting used to "occidental" ideas. Of course, this means that most of those thousands of Russian productions have abysmal quality since they are rushed and mass-produced, but the point is to sink foreign movies in a sea of Russian traditional values.

I believe that's it for the moment, if I get some more ideas to comment about Russia I'll make another post at some later date.

Oh, just a small comment about Ukraine: Occidental media is bashing Russia as the evil in the world. Russian media is reporting the incident as the saviors of the poor people who have Russian culture in Ukraine.

What I believe to be the reality is that USA and EU are really big bastards that want to control Ukraine to have a better control of the gas that goes through it. Russia is another really big bastard that wants to annex some territories and keep control of Ukraine as when it was ruled by the corrupt last president.  Both sides are bad, and both sides are perfectly capable of terrible things. USA is an expert in invading countries whenever they like and putting friendly dictators (friendly to USA, of course) in power. EU and the FMI are experts in destabilizing regions and condemning areas to levels of poverty and debt that no one can recover from. Russia is an expert in silencing protests and suppressing people and ideas or lifestyles. All of them are experts in corruption at the highest levels. Between them, there's the Ukrainians who would like to be able to travel and work in Europe without visas, and to have more freedom than what they have now.

Hard to choose a side when they're all bad....



  

Our Lasts 2 Months In Russia

We're starting the last phases of the project.

Next month we will be very busy, at least when it comes to the amount of hours we will be working. We will be doing lots of long shifts, including night work. This always destroys you, and by the end I will be completely exhausted, regardless of how good or how bad the final result is.

Depending on how this goes, I'll write a post later on about our last impressions in Russia, but I can already say we're happy to go. We have lived well here, but it's not an easy place, and we prefer to live in places where, for example, you don't usually need to worry about having electricity.

These last months have been a lot of fun with Elay. He has grown a lot (as all babies do, but once you notice the changes in past photos and behavior, it's amazing), and for a long time now he reacts to us, smiles, laughs and "talks" with us (well, he makes sounds in your direction, and he's clearly trying to tell you something).

It's really funny^^.

He has started to be more mobile, but we don't need to worry yet about him crawling. We just have noticed that sometimes we leave him on a little carpet with drawings and toys, for kids, and when we look again, he has moved 180 degrees.

He has also learned to grab things, and even to throw them away. He still hasn't enough control, but he has a clear idea. For example, when we put him in bed to sleep he starts grabbing his pacifier and raising it while staring at it. Then he tries to put it back into his mouth, but it usually ends up in his neck, or even in his nose. Of course, this prevents him from relaxing enough to fall asleep, and we need to grab his hands sometimes so he doesn't keep grabbing the pacifier...then again, when he wants, he just spits it.

He started to like toys, with clear favorites that get him all excited and nervous. There are also certain movements (like flexing his legs, or tickling him) that usually makes him laugh, and it's really nice to hear^^.

Apart from enjoying our baby, this next two months we will need to prepare to move out again.

This time we will have the help of our company, but the process is very stressful and we get tired just of thinking about it. Of course, one of the main problems is that we do not have enough space in Barcelona for all our things, and we don't know what are we going to do next so it's unclear if we should rent or use some storage service...oh well...

Right now, we will just enjoy living here together a little bit more^^

And Now We're Three

Our son Elay was born 3 weeks and a half ago.

On Monday, 16th of September, a day before we had a visit with the doctor, contractions started apparently and we went to the hospital. Contractions calmed down, but the doctors told us that everything was ready and it could start at any moment. Since even when it started it would take long (4-5 hours probably), I was sent back home, since in Russian hospitals nobody apart from the mother can enter in the normal rooms, and you can only be during the birth by special permission.

While at home, my wife called me and told me that after analysis, doctors decided that a C-section was necessary and actually urgent, and they were preparing her for it. In 2 hours it should be done, and he should be born. After waiting at home for more news, I finally was told that we were parents.

However, given the fragile condition anyone is after surgery, my wife had to be one day recovering before seeing our son. I could not really visit, so I had to wait to see them both. While working and waiting, my wife finally got to be with him, and sent some pics and videos. These days were a little bit frustrating, but the pics were really nice. Both were doing very well, and recovering very fast.

On Saturday they got permission to leave, so I finally went, together with Misha (who helped us by driving us in his car), and I finally met him. It was a very weird and exciting moment, and I noticed I had a stupid smile for quite a few minutes after holding him for the first time^^. After all, before this moment, I was not fully aware that I was a father...I knew I was, but I had not seen him or held him, so the feeling was similar as if he was still inside the belly...

Since that day we've been happily living together, and adapting to this new person^^.

First thing that we've noticed is that he's very funny to look at^^. He's still very small, of course, so he makes all this faces and movements. When he's hungry, he usually sticks out his tongue, makes little sounds and eats his hand. He keeps twisting his lips in weird ways, and he's very awake when not sleeping, looking everywhere. He focuses his eyes on you, crossing them a little and making a surprised face, and he's very funny^^. We have already taken some funny pics^^. At the same time we're trying not to hunt people to show them pics, and we're managing well in that aspect.

He's quite calm, if he's not hungry or uncomfortable he doesn't cry much (he just makes this single cry for attention when he's hungry or when he just woke up and we're not there with him, most of the time). We're lucky so far, and he seems to like to sleep deeply during the night (which means 4-5 hours, which for a baby is a lot), and until there's light, he just wakes up to feed a little and then he continues to sleep. During the day he's awake quite a lot of hours, just feeding and looking all around, with very curious eyes.

We're unsure about resemblances, but then again we're really bad with faces, or we don't care that much about these things...he clearly looks like his mother in lots of things, but recently we saw a picture of me when I was a newborn too, and since then we realise he has also a strong resemblance with me. He's too little anyway, and his features have changed a lot in just a couple of weeks (and will change even more).

He makes quite a lot of funny noises, grunts, little cries and other sounds that are quite cute^^. He moves his arms and legs not very coordinated, but you can notice when he's stressing about something,  because he squirms and moves all extremities. It's quite funny to see how he doesn't control them well enough yet, and sometimes he bothers himself with his hands, or pushes away my wife's breast while being stressed and trying to grab it with his mouth^^.

For the moment I still feel quite useless. My wife breast-feeds him (of course), so at night she needs to wake up, and I'm rather useless and go back to sleep (or not even wake up). Also, I'm still not good at changing his clothes and pampers, mainly because I'm too slow. Oh well...I do hold him, and walk him around the apartment when he's awake, and I managed to put him to sleep several times when he was not hungry. I try to speak with him in Catalan, explaining thingies that we're doing, and my wife is trying to use Russian, but some times we get back to English because we're used to it...

We're still learning lots of things, checking articles and books regarding what to do, what not to do, what's normal, what can we expect, and all those things. We try not to worry too much, and I think we're so far doing good in that side (for example, we know that when he's sleeping is normal to make sounds, and we don't take him any time he makes a little cry, we wait until he's really awake). Of course, things are still complicated and we don't know a lot, but we're trying to learn.

One very funny thing that we've noticed is that he hates not having some clothes on his body, and that he doesn't like baths at all. After the first bath, next time we undressed him he started to cry a lot and to make a devastated face. It was quite funny and heart-breaking at the same time, and we tried to calm him down and tell him everything is fine, but we couldn't help to laugh at his exaggerated reaction. Since then it has been the same every time we change his clothes, clean him while naked or prepare him for a bath...but well, we hope he may calm down and also learn to enjoy baths when he's more aware of his surroundings and he's able to hold his head without problems.

At this point our lives haven't changed much yet, only thing is that we're staying more at home. Since he's so small and sleeps so much, when he's sleeping we keep watching series and playing games, with the only difference being that we check on him, and that, of course when he's awake, we try to talk with him, and give him attention.

So far we're managing quite well with him, and we're starting to have fun together^^. It's quite a weird feeling, to have this little person to take care of and educate later on...but we're enjoying it a lot^^.

While we were adapting to this new life, here in Sochi it has been raining a lot. In the usual Russian way, several old and new roads "forgot" to have any kind of good drainage, and there was severe flooding (even when the rain itself was not that intense). We happily avoided it by taking care of our little person without moving from home, but I did have to go to Sochi once, to get papers from the hospital, and it was a terrible experience that I hope not to repeat...

Anyway, we're quite happy with our new lives, and waiting to discover more and more things together^^.

The Stroller

Tomorrow we will enter the period in which, if the birth takes place, it will be considered that the pregnancy had normal duration.

Being so close to having a son (probably) is really exciting. They bay has grown a lot and for several months my wife and I can "play" with him by touching the belly in parts where his legs or hands are pressing , and noticing all the movements. It's really funny to notice how he stretches or how he reacts when we touch his feet^^.

We have finally prepared the emergency bag for the hospital, and we believe we have everything more or less ready. We have lots of clothes that everybody has been giving us, several toys and things that other expats have offered  to us, a bed and a stroller.

The stroller took a lot of time and effort. When we first checked what was there in the market, we visited some internet pages, read recommendations and such things. We created a certain picture in our mind, about what exactly did we want for a stroller.

First of all, we wanted a 2 in 1. This model has two different baskets, one were the baby lays on his back and is meant for small babies, and another one that is more like a sit, but that can be rearranged in several ways, for older babies. These two baskets needed to be of good quality and with several settings, while being able to protect the baby from the sun, the cold, or from insects. Then we wanted big wheels, since Adler has quite hard streets, and we needed something resistant and able to move with obstacles and bumps. We also wanted to be able to turn the stroller without having to lift the front wheels. We wanted a basket under the stroller with easy access, and finally we wanted it to be as light as possible (the lighter ones are around 11 Kg). We would also like nice colours in the stroller, but we were more flexible in that aspect. Finally the price should not be very expensive.

This was clearly impossible to get.

First thing we did was visiting all the shops we could find in Adler and Sochi. We actually did several trips to Sochi, to one big shopping centre, so we could see a selection of strollers. However, most shops in that centre had a very small selection. In Adler things were not much better, but there was a couple of shops that had some more strollers.

All of these strollers were not even close to our requirements. Most were transformers or 3 in 1. Some 2 in 1 had big wheels, but could not turn them at all. Even the expensive ones were bad, without turning wheels or with terrible handlebars. One of the most decent ones had a stupid bar that did not allow access to the basket, and most of them were almost 20 Kg in weight.

We have spent close to 2 months visiting these shops, from time to time, and with no luck. After a while we decided to turn to internet, to see if we could order the stroller from there.

In shops outside Russia there were awesome strollers, but also really expensive ones. However, the sending prices were huge, and would take months to reach us. If that wasn't enough, to enter the country we would need to pay taxes, and the price easily doubled.

As per the Russian on-line shops, prices were not much cheaper plus we had no trust in them. It seems in Russia it's still normal to put a website and then cheat and trick people out of their money. In normal countries these practices are mostly eliminated, because they're not productive at all, but well, it's Russia.

We've also heard that deliveries in Russia may take 2 months, and you may find your package open and missing something. Besides, since the country is so big, maybe they don't even send things to the place where you live.

We couldn't trust on-line shopping. We were already thinking we would buy a second hand transformer for a cheap price, and get a good stroller in Barcelona.

However, a couple of weeks ago, we were in one of the baby shops trying to buy other things for the baby, and we checked strollers one more time, just for fun. In the middle of the usual ones, there was one that looked new, decent, and that had all the things we wanted. After asking about it, it turned out it was really new, just arrived to the shop. They had it in a couple of colours.

We checked the stroller, and it was really good. We really liked it. We ordered one in a different colour, and picked it up the following week.

It was a great release. We were not thinking about it, but we were very tired of trying to find the ideal one, and we felt very lucky to have found this by random chance.

However, this showed us the difficulties of buying anything in here. They don't have consistent deliveries, they don't have the same products, they have very limited stock, and you cannot trust on-line shops.

All in all, we're really glad we will not be living here once the Olympics finish...

Erasmus Anniversary

5 years ago, (plus a couple of days) I left Barcelona to finish my university degree in Lund, Sweden. That was one of the best decisions I've taken, and I really loved my time there and all the people I met there.

This is not the first time I had a similar experience, and probably not the last.

When I was 17, I participated in an exchange program in my high school. For a week, I had a Swedish girl (Marianne) living in my house and visiting my high school (together with other Swedes). This was the first time I was in such an international environment, and the first time I had to actively use English to communicate. The ones that participated in it also got to skip some classes, and it was really awesome. I made a friend, and I keep contact with her more than with most people in my high school. When we visited Sweden in return, it was also a great experience, seeing another culture and other ways to do things while using another language that was not our own.

That same year I did Santiago's way with my parents. This is a 740 km long route in the north-west of Spain, done in around 30 days. The origin is religious, but we did it just because we enjoyed walking and visiting new places. While doing it we met lots of nice and different people from all around the world, and one of the people I met was a girl from U.K, that introduced me to the fact that English music is fucking awesome. I already knew that, but I was not fully conscious of how bad the music in Spain was, I believe. This also increased my curiosity regarding U.K, and made me want to visit it and even live there some day. After the way, we lost contact with most of the people, even if we still keep in touch with a few. I realised a simple thing there: Doing the same path again would not feel the same way, because the people walking with me would be different. This way was done, and it would be impossible to repeat it. However, that does not mean you need to stop enjoying walking, or that you need to become obsessed with that single time when everything was so good and the people were so nice.

When I was 18, inspired by last year's meetings and trips, I went to England alone, and visited several cities there. I had great experiences, and I had a first contact with a country that has a wide range of defects, but also has quite nice qualities. After the first trip, I returned quite shortly to attend a music festival with the girl we met during the way and other people. It was great, and I repeated the trip a few more years. I lost contact with that girl, but I met great people while in the festival, people I never met again but oh well.

After this I had to study hard at university, but I did manage to make some nice trips, like the year I went to China for a month with some friends. The cultural shock was quite brutal, but it was really interesting and we survived somehow, even when we were basically backpacking around the place and searching places to stay from one day to the next.

Finally, before ending university I wanted to enjoy university life to the fullest before starting to work, and I went for an Erasmus, as I mentioned.

During an Erasmus you meet lots of people from all around the world, and you really have incredible amounts of fun. It is incredible to call some people you know, just grab the bike and go to some party somewhere. At least, to learn if you enjoy these things or not, and also to learn how to live by yourself and take care of things, organise events, meet and communicate, and all that.

I met my wife there, thanks to a Japanese common friend that I met on the very first day, while trying to find a supermarket to buy some basic survival food. We started dating later on, but without living there, without meeting by chance a person who was just also looking for food, that would have not happened. We always have fun with the fact that a Lithuanian girl and a Spanish boy met in Sweden, obviously. It confuses people a lot ^^.

The first semester was amazing, but of course most people left, and therefore it's the same as in Santiago's way, not possible to really repeat even if we lived there again.

After the Erasmus, I found a job by pure luck in my current company, that offered me the option to continue travelling. I visited Vancouver, and after some years I had (finally) the chance to go and live in U.K., in London.

While working for London Olympics, again I met people from all around the world, and every week there was some party at some pub (even if I didn't go to most of them, there was the option). It reminded us a lot of an Erasmus, actually. In London there were also people I met in Sweden, so my wife and I managed to keep contact with them and meet them, while meeting others who were there working with me. It was also a great experience. London was not as nice as I thought when I was 18, but it was still pretty awesome, the music still was way better than in Spain, and in general we had a great time there. We got married there, and we have an English marriage certificate, as a matter of fact.

Our London life was strangely similar to an Erasmus, and we enjoyed it  a lot too. Afterwards, most co-workers went to their separate ways, and we had the chance to move to Russia and work for Sochi Olympics.

Here again we have met lots of nice people. Here again we have had great experiences.

Our first son (that's the official opinion) will be born here, in a month or even sooner. We will have fun explaining that we're a Lithuanian-Spanish couple that met in Sweden, married in England and had a child in Russia (obviously).

And here again we will leave and it will not be possible to repeat it, but we will take this great experiences and know that we have enjoyed them a lot.

And later on, maybe there will be other countries to visit, other places to live, new people to meet...

Without travels, without Erasmus-like experiences, I would be different. I am married because of Erasmus. We will have a child because of Erasmus. Without Erasmus I might have done these things...or maybe not. But because of Erasmus, these things have happened. And every trip, every second, or third, or fourth Erasmus or pre-Erasmus we have, we enjoy it as if it was the first, even when the people and the places are different and the same conditions are always unrepeatable.

I believe that all these trips and meetings make you open your views, make you learn new things, make your life change for the better. I believe that everybody should have such experiences, if they could. We would be smarter as a society if we would do so.

Finally, I believe that these trips and meetings are really, really funny and nice^^. So don't miss the chance to do them, if you can.

Time To Fire People

In lights of my future parenthood, we are trying at home to prepare everything to make our baby legal.

We decided to have a baby in Russia while living there temporarily and being Lithuanian and Spanish. That may cause some problems, as you can imagine, and the past few days we have tried to call our different embassies and consulates to understand what will be needed from us to make the governments understand that the baby is ours, that therefore he has a right to be Spanish and Lithuanian, and to obtain a passport so he can legally be in Russia.

I guess it comes as no surprise to anybody that the result is a clusterfuck of idiocy, papers, lack of logic, incompetence, bureaucracy and so on...

It seems terribly hard to comprehend for authorities of any country that you are actually you. I understand that if it was easy to pretend to be someone, there would be a lot of associated problems to that. I also understand that in the dark ages, the only way to proof that you're "You" would be to bring numerous amount of papers and documentation, together with signatures and even some witnesses.

However, for he past few years, there's this little thing called "electronic ID" or "electronic passport", that we have been using. If you know a little bit about cryptography, you can easily see the point...if you don't, trust me on this: A digital signature can be INCREDIBLY hard to falsify, compared to what can you do using dark photos, good handwriting skills and make up. Specially if the digital signature is authenticating stuff like your actual picture and your digital prints.

Given these facts, all paperwork should only require such a digital signature, the same one that is already used in lots of passports and IDs, like my Spanish ID or my Spanish passport. (I mean, these things are already used regularly, we're not talking about science-fiction stuff you can only find in MIT labs).

Anyway, these facts and my latest interactions with certain personnel has reminded me about a core problem that, I believe, is an important cause of such clusterfucks, and also an important cause of corruption, idiocy, outdated systems and other such things in Spain (and other countries): We need to fire people.

Now, this is a controversial statement. Plenty of times I've indicated that the Spanish problem is otherwise, how easy has it become to fire people. This is also true, so let's specify: We should be able to fire people that are really incompetent or useless on purpose, regardless of position or organization. I hope this clears it more. I can think of 3 groups that would require more firing options.

First, there's public administration workers. Public workers, at least in Spain (maybe in some countries it's different), cannot be fired, ever, except in extreme circumstances (as in, peeing over customers may cause them to be fired. Short of that, it's a rather hard thing to happen).

I know public workers that are great people and good at their job. Just these days I've talked with very competent people. However, I've also talked with really idiotic people, who clearly were bothered by the fact that they had to work now, after a question!.

For some reason, it is very hard to fire public workers, and that's a big problem, because we all need a certain amount of "fear" to perform a good job.

Liberal theories tend to support the idea of companies having lots of freedom when dealing with workers. One of the ideas behind this is that, otherwise, workers are not productive enough and the company will fail. Social theories indicate that company bosses, if given enough freedom, will exploit workers as much as they can, making society a much worse place. Both theories, however, sometimes seem to fail to ignore a more basic principle: We people are, in general, bastards that sacrifice someone's else well-being and freedom if it means we get to have some benefit out of it. It is not true of everybody, but given the chance to do something "bad" that brings a benefit to you, a large amount of us will take the benefit. 

If you apply this principle to bosses, you can see that most of them (not all) will exploit workers if they have the chance. However, applied to the workers, it also says that most workers (not all) will actually be not productive at all if given the chance.

Therefore, we need an equilibrium of worker rights and company rights. This equilibrium would mean that the company cannot exploit workers and fire them at will, while workers need to actually work or be fired.

In the public administration we do not have this equilibrium, and without the fear of being fired some people simply refuse to work. I was told by a public administrator that when someone works normally, not overdoing it but not taking unnecessary constant breaks, lots of other public workers usually complain because it makes them look bad.

It has reached a point where I believe that some people try to enter public administration to avoid work whatsoever. This is unacceptable, and it´s one of the causes of the administration clusterfuck we usually suffer.You may be regular at your job, and then you should not be fired. But when you´re consciously doing nothing most of the time, to the point where yearly evaluations could show how little you are really doing, it should be possible to fire you.

There's lots of possible jobs in the world, and there's always something you can be good enough at to be able to work on that, or something that interests you. Even if you cannot work in something that you´re really passionate about, you can always work at some place and do some regular, good enough, job. The problem is when you´re not even doing that...

The second group that could use more firing is the "kings of the hill". As in Firefly: "Sad little king of a sad little hill". Self-important pricks.

There's lots of people in administration and in different organizations that has some position and believes themselves to be very important. And maybe inside that organization they are important, we're not denying that. However, they act as if everybody everywhere should give them respect just because of that.

A classic example is the typical case of an on-line community, where its creator and moderator, instead of taking a more passive approach or attitude, participates a lot and with hot opinions. Regardless of right or wrong, some of these community creators act as gods, banning people who disagree with them, giving extra benefits to the people who are nice to them, and all that.

Applied to something more serious, the big political parties all work kind of like this. Some public organisations also work like this, and the reason sometimes paperwork takes so long is because these people, by how important they are, need to stamp everything with their signature before it can be approved...while being too busy to do that very often, of course (several of these overlap with the first group).

The end result is that administration and some other organizations are full of very very stupid steps that do not help, do not give anything, and in this day and age can be easily made more secure and easier to perform by technology.

Therefore, we could improve things by firing some of these positions that are rather obsolete, while also getting rid of very annoying behaviours and attitudes that accompany such people plenty of times.

The final group that we need to be able to fire in an easier way are governmental officials and similar high positions. I'd talk about them, but there's no need: To prove why do we need that, we can always check today's circus at the Spanish parliament, the conclusions of which are that the current rulers will deny doing anything wrong ever, and if you voted for them that's too bad, if you want to change any tiny little aspect of their policies you'll need to wait until next elections.